Join us for a reading to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review! Featuring keynote poet Sasha West, with Christian Rees, Sam Sax, Shonna Skarda, and David Meischen.

Sasha West’s first book, Failure and I Bury the Body (Harper Perennial), won the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. It was also featured in the Poets & Writers emerging poets issue. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Ninth Letter, Forklift Ohio, Born, and elsewhere. She lives in Austin, Texas, where she teaches writing at the University of Texas’s LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Christian Rees is an alumnus of Loyola University of Maryland’s writing program. He has been published online in JMWW, Row Home Lit, Pithead Chapel, and Permafrost Review and his poem “The Bone House” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He divides his time in Texas working as a literacy advocate, in prisoner outreach, and running long distances.

Sam Sax is a Fellow at The Michener Center for Writers and the associate poetry editor for Bat City Review. He’s the author of the chapbooks, A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters (Button 2014), and sad boy / detective (Winner of the 2014 Black River Chapbook Award). His poems are forthcoming from Boston Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Minnesota Review, Vinyl, and other journals.

Shonna Skarda was raised in El Paso and has lived in the Austin area since 1996. She is a licensed dyslexia therapist who works with children and adults to remediate difficulties with reading and writing. Shonna’s poetry also appeared in issue 39 of Borderlands.

David Meischen has been writing poetry and teaching the writing of poetry for thirty years. He has had poems in The Southern Review, Southern Poetry Review, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere. Co-founder of Dos Gatos Press and co-editor of Wingbeats and Wingbeats II, collections of poetry writing exercises, Meischen is also a fiction writer, with recent work in The Evansville Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Valparaiso Fiction Review.